New Yorker site redesigned

The New Yorker redesign just went live. Not sure if I like it yet, but I don’t not like it. Some quick notes after 15 minutes of kicking the tires, starting with the ugly and proceeding from there:

Only some of the old article URLs seem to work, which majorly sucks. This one from 2002 doesn’t work and neither does this one from late 2005. This David Sedaris piece from 9/2006 does. kottke.org has links to the New Yorker going back to mid-2001…I’d be more than happy to supply them so some proper rewrite rules can be constructed. I’d say that more than 70% of the 200+ links from kottke.org to the New Yorker site are dead…to say nothing of all the links in Google, Yahoo, and 5 million other blogs. Not good.

The full text of at least one article (Stacy Schiff’s article on Wikipedia) has been pulled from the site and has been replaced by an abstract of the article and the following notice:

The New Yorker’s archives are not yet fully available online. The full text of all articles published before May, 2006, can be found in “The Complete New Yorker,” which is available for purchase on DVD and hard drive.

Not sure if this is the only case or if the all longer articles from before a certain date have been pulled offline. This also is not good.

The first thing I looked for was the table of contents for the most recent issue because that’s, by far, the page I most use on the site (it’s the defacto “what’s new” page). Took me about a minute to find the link…it’s hidden in small text on the right-hand side of the site.

There are several RSS options, but there’s no RSS autodiscovery going on. That’s an easy fix. The main feed validates but with a few warnings. The bigger problem is that the feed only shows the last 10 items, which isn’t even enough to cover an entire new issue’s worth of stories and online-only extras.

Some odd spacing issues and other tiny bugs here and there. The default font size and line spacing make the articles a little hard to read…just a bit more line spacing would be great. And maybe default to the medium size font instead of the small. A little rough around the edges is all.

All articles include the stardard suite of article tools: change the font size, print, email to a friend, and links to Digg, del.icio.us, & Reddit. Each article is also accompanied by a list of keywords which function more or less like tags.

Overall, the look of the site is nice and clean with ample white space where you need it. The site seems well thought out, all in all. A definite improvement over the old site.

Reader comments

There’s something so wrong about digg on a New Yorker article. What happened to elitist snobbery? Have we given it up for good? Screw the hoi polloi if they can’t find it. Let them discuss the local tabloids at a bus station.

Yes, it would have been stupid ten years ago to not redirect the old links. Now…

And if they expect people to go back to their New Yorker DVDs (yes, I own them not to mention boxes of the magazine), but as Mark says I use the web to pass tthe articles on to people or link to them in posts (before they had search on tthe site, I’d do a post almost every week with the most interesting articles).

I think it looks great, a huge, huge improvement over what they had. Jason, you point out a lot of small bugs (rss, etc) that I think they can fix quickly. Hopefully they get the archives thing worked out and I’d love to see them move to single-page archives across the board.

It’s a lot easier on the eyes overall. One nice trick I noticed was the CSS drop caps within articles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them done so simply.

Whoosh - “Not sure if I like it yet, but I don’t not like it”s sums it up pretty well.

The thing that jumps out at me first is the word “The” added to the logo in the banner. That’s not at all how it appears in print, in their actual logo. The “the” is traditionally smaller and centered over the words “New Yorker.” Not only did they move it, down and make it big, the shapes of the letters are different. It feels like a different font. Maybe they stretched it?

besides the fact that the visual design and layout looks like an amalgamation of nymag.com and nytimes.com, it is impossible to tell what is a link without rolling over the text in the sidebar. i am assuming this obvious oversight will be remedied quickly.

I’ve always found their search engine to be frustrating. Seems to me that this would be a priority for modifications. It looks like there’s been changes to it, where the exactly-quoted article headline that was inputed now produces the desired result somewhat toward the top, as opposed to on page 3 of 1,000 results.

Someone needs to also tell them that the Subscribe menu option (the one higlighted in red) only works, funnily enough, from the 404 page. From other pages it goes to http://www.newyorker.com/menuSubscribe

1) Embedding unrelated cartoons in the middle of articles—obviously this is the classic New Yorker format for the printed page, but it strikes me as weird on a web page. I don’t know, I guess it’s not a terrible thing, but it seems to conflate the way we consume a print magazine with the way we consume online content. If I want to read the cartoons online, I should be able to click on a “Cartoons” link somewhere.

2) Having to type in a page number and hit Return to jump to that page == weird.

3) All the headings in the classic “New Yorker” font look very nice, but this would be a perfect, textbook use for sIFR. Instead, they’re images. Not only does this present accessibility and cutting-and-pasting issues, but it must be a pain on the production side.

4) Similarly: A poem formatted as an image, and when you click on it you get the text? Weird.

“Most New Yorker articles since 2001 and selected pieces from before; thousands of brief reviews of books, movies, recordings, and restaurants; and a searchable index, with abstracts, of articles since 1925.”

Sounds like they’re working on the broken links & missing content and that once they’re done, there will be more content on the site than there was before.

Anyone know if they did it all in-house, or if they had any design help? (The impossible-to-overlook similarity to nymag.com and nytimes.com makes me think there’s a small cabal of black-on-white designers in nyc.)

In a rather extraordinary feat of print-based thinking, they managed to avoid indicating a single link, aside from the main nav links and a few others indicated by context. I don’t know, perhaps they consider this as a “value-added” feature: In addition to reading interesting articles, you get to play a game of “find the link.”

I like it somewhat, but the pages are a bit too full for me. Also the line-height really is too small and the homepage layout breaks slightly in Ubuntu Firefox. And WHY don’t they use sIFR?Still, I don’t not like it :-)

There are differing views on the value of validation. There’s a well-known axiom in sofware development called Postel’s Law. Its states that one should “be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others”. Most web browsers are very forgiving in what they accept for input and we should try to uphold our end of the bargain. As the above article notes, that can be difficult…the front page of my site doesn’t validate either. Most of the errors pertain to unescaped URLs and a few invalid tag errors because my CMS doesn’t deal with lists properly (it nests them in a <p> tag when it shouldn’t).